When you talk about coal in South Africa, it’s always best to start with some maths. And history. And geology. And then, of course, there is politics.
The geology is complicated because the time period involved runs into billions of years, and since we still argue about the significance of the Boer War, it’s easy to imagine why it gets complicated pretty quickly. But if you dust away mountains of history and conjecture, the simplistic explanation is that a large chunk of what is now the northern bit of South Africa consisted about a billion years ago of an unusually large, unusually ancient piece of crystalline basement rock, called the Kaapvaal Craton.
Its comparative stability over the next billion years created the foundation for a huge array of metals to gradually deposit through weathering. At the centre of the craton, there was a lake (or possibly the sea), and the rivers into the lake gathered and concentrated metals from the weathering process.
